I think of it as, the fleets are WAY WAY WAY smaller than they appear (so are the planets, asteroids, etc) on the main view.
As such, the bubbles and so on are easy to avoid when navigating, and the course corrections required are trivial to fix.
Forced contact is by interdiction pulse type mechanic, involving phasing your own drive field to specifically cancel out the enemy's drive field, allowing you to force a confrontation.
Destroy enemy ships, they can't disrupt your drives.
Get far enough away, you can, at least for a short time, modulate your own drive fields to bypass the interference. (Too close, and it just breaks in general)
No need for game level mechanic changes, just explain the current mechanics.
Otherwise I would have wanted Explosive and Kinetic damage to have inverted effects on shield and armor. Kinetic to pierce armor, explosive to deal more general damage that the shield has to block all of it. Instead, I decided that Shields struggle with pinpoint defense, and are better at area (explosive) effects, while armor is reactive, so explosives, which strip larger areas, are better, while kinetic is just deflected.
